The National Health Service in the United Kingdom is bloodied and broken, but not because it is, as has been claimed, an evil socialist system designed to provide minimal care with minimal resources while sucking maximum taxes from the subjects of a tyrannical leftist political regime. No, it’s bloodied and bruised face is consequential of a propaganda machine working harder and faster than Usain Bolt on ecstasy in a race to save his family from imminent death. The moment the 44th president of the United States publically coupled the words “healthcare” and “reform” the innocent and helpless NHS was in for a slanderous butt kicking comparable to a night out with Rodney King and LA Law Enforcement. Within hours of the announcement for reform we started to hear stories of cockroach infested facilities, hospital corridors with a pacing Grim Reaper waiting to pick off yet another victim who was awaiting life-saving treatment that never came and so-called “death-panels” consisting of characters similar to Hitler, Nero and Darth Vader, tasked to decide who lived and died with chilling apathy and the occasional evil laugh thrown in for good measure.
As the rumors circulated about the squalid, prehistoric, third-world-esk British healthcare system I began to scratch my head and wonder if they were talking about the same place I was born and had spent 90% of my life. Having been blessed with a psychotically daring mind, a neurotic obsession with danger and a love and passion for all things sport I had managed to frequent several NHS properties over the years. My resume with the NHS includes an operation, eight or nine visits to A & E (the ER for my American readers), several-dozen visits to various general practitioners and lifelong involvement with a large eye hospital in central London. My firstborn son was also dragged into the world by NHS staff in central Essex. Luke encountered some potential problems during parturition on his way down the birth canal, a team of five midwives, a couple of doctors and countless assistants were on standby that Christmas morning, they were accompanied by the most sophisticated resuscitation equipment money can buy. Fortunately the team and the equipment were not needed as Luke popped out with the toughness of a Spartan coupled with the insouciant disposition of a Bob Marley fan in a smoke filled tent.
During an epic evening long long ago in a galaxy far far away in my pre-youth pastor life while celebrating an emphatic England football (soccer) victory over a close rival, my blood stream suddenly encountered significant quantities of alcohol, vomiting followed and not too long after a collapsed lung was the result, finally brought on by a ride on the porcelain horse. I was sent straight to the hospital where I was immediately greeted by a physician and his team and my disenfranchised lung was commissioned back into active service. Strangely enough I didn’t lay abandoned in a damp, dark hospital hallway with flickering lights trying to avoid an arm wrestle with Death himself, nor was I asked to apply for medical attention to the cronies on the dreaded death panel, who were no doubt aboard the Death Star orbiting our little sick and twisted socialist island
Perhaps the most hilarious assault on the NHS came with the astonishing statement from an Investor’s Business Daily reporter - who is about as ignorant as a Miss World contestant in a quantum physics debate – who claimed that if Stephen Hawking were British he would indeed be dead as the NHS death panel would surely have denied him care due to his physical impairment. Despite the American accent on Dr Hawking’s speech synthesizer he is in fact British, has only ever been treated by the evil NHS and only recently retired as the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University, which sits at the very top of the global university rankings – yet another product of a poorly resourced socialist government!
At this point let’s take a brief timeout from my outrageous onslaught on disinformation and let me say that I have no political agenda, I am an independent in the truest possible sense. To the liberals I am conservative, to the conservatives I am evil and to the politically active I am apathetic. I learned a long time ago, around four-years of age, that the blue = good, red = bad Tarzan approach to politics and life is reserved for those who are happy to allow the puppeteer’s hand access to their posterior. The more I subject myself to the commentary of those who are politically active the more I am attracted to complete anarchy (just kidding employees of the FBI). What I am interested in though, is truth and people and I must say that both have been abandoned in recent months on this issue.
Before this article is written off as a huge, wet, proverbial kiss placed on the four cheeks of the NHS and universal healthcare let me just say that I have experienced the very worst of healthcare. My father fell victim to the most horrendous incompetency exhibited by medical staff, the price he paid for their atrocious lack of professionalism and the most basic level of common sense was his life. The stupidity and mindlessness on display that day is comparable to the output of sufferers of debilitating mental retardation. There is simply no excuse for that level of utter stupidity and lethal incompetency in any healthcare system in the world. For the safety of society those involved should be unemployed and never allowed access to a career involving the provision of life again. There is no doubt, however, that this gross malpractice is not exclusive to the NHS. Since that fateful day I have heard many similar stories from around the world, including the United States. Medical malpractice is evident in nationalized and privatized healthcare systems alike.
In 2006 I was taken into a hospital in the US after hours of continuous vomiting and diarrhea, I was extremely dehydrated and my body refused to retain any level of fluid. My face was as pale as the thighs of a Scandinavian nun and my consciousness was like that of the sole guest to a party celebrating the 41st day of a 40-day fast with Hannibal Lector. When the gentleman on the front desk asked me to rate my pain level on a scale of 1-10, in-between bites of his tuna-salad sandwich, my response was “blllaaaaaaaaa.” I was then given the privilege of sitting on a bed in the hospital hallway for an hour waiting for the doctor before relocating to the bathroom and falling mostly unconscious for another hour. After being denied hydration because the doctor hadn’t yet approved it, which was of course impossible seeing as he was totally unaware of my earthly existence at that time, I was left spiraling towards bodily shutdown. Finally, after some good old English snobbery, I was given an IV and my dehydrated body lapped up the fluids and left its unpleasant stay at the island of total desiccation. My next pleasant surprise appeared with the smile of a nurse as she informed me the laboratory was eager for me to defecate in the delightful cardboard platter she had in her possession. I willingly did so and brought the obscurely colored sample to my bedside where I expected the nurse and an armed guard to escort it to the lab. However, it sat there for some time, approximately three hours in fact, while I sent messenger after messenger, just as Noah sent the raven and dove in search of dry land, but the repeated answer was “sorry, too busy right now.” To add to this utter delight I had the pleasure of welcoming a dozen or more guests to my room, mainly concerned students and their parents, and sat next to me in all his glory, possibly reading a newspaper, was my grinning fragrant friend. At that particular moment I felt about as welcome at that privatized facility as a bacon sandwich at a Bar Mitzvah.
In conclusion I would like to point out that my aim here is not to convert the conservative masses to my fiendish commy belief-system, nor is it to promote the Obama administration or his agenda, his bullish onslaught on one of Britain’s finest companies has him crossed off my slow dance list anyway. My objective is to simply administer truth and help defend one of the greatest achievements in British societal history. The most compelling evidence in all of this is simply the fact that if universal healthcare was discontinued in Britain its people would activate a revolution the scale of which has rarely been seen in the Western hemisphere.
I’m off to request another two years of life from the death panel, wish me luck…
